The Once and Future King: Part Two
by Nonchey Niente
Summary: Second part of my totally out-of-control mammoth epic fic.


****

I'm afraid I have no idea who owns the rights to the characters of the television series of The Dead Zone, so I assume it is a mixture of Stephen King, The USA Network, Piller2 and Lions Gate.

The ideas, however...are mine. Don't blame anyone else.

This fiction has been created purely for my own enjoyment. However, if anyone would LIKE to pay me for it, I am always open to offers.

Spoilers: Don't read this if you haven't seen "Visions". 

Rating: PG13 

The Once and Future King - PART TWO

John Smith lay on his belly on his bedroom floor, wishing fervently that he had a better memory. It had to be somewhere here, surely? Where else in the house could he have left it?

The view under his bed was not promising at all. 

A great deal of dust, for a start. A large black plastic bag filled with something which he felt strongly it might be better not to try and remember. A cardboard box full of elderly cassette tapes. A book that he had sworn blind on several separate occasions that he had already returned to Sarah. One single pale brown silk stocking - Dana's. 

Senator Harrison Fisher had once told him that he could divine all about a man by the contents of his wallet. Johnny wondered what the Senator would make of the underneath of someone's bed. Could that be just as revealing as what was in his pocket book? 

Johnny shifted his body awkwardly, peering around the battered corner of the cardboard box of tapes. There it was! He flicked his cane deftly underneath the bed and pulled the object towards him. Jeffrey Grissom's parting gift to Johnny - his walking stick. 

Johnny knew that the old man had never needed the cane at all - as soon as Grissom had seen his old house, his entire physical attitude and posture had shifted suddenly. The cane had been part of an elaborate act, a disguise designed to fool his captors into thinking that he was a great deal frailer than he actually was, in the hope that they might get careless with him one day. As, indeed, they had. Very often nowadays Johnny didn't need his own cane, either, but it suited him for the time being to let people think that he did.

Johnny hefted Grissom's cane and examined the elegant carved antler handle appreciatively. Perfect.

Now Johnny need only use his own cane when he felt it was appropriate for Wey to know what was going on. Johnny smiled wryly at the sudden devious turn in his character. It was now seven days after his vision of Moosehead Lake.

The doorbell chimed. Johnny made his way downstairs to buzz Purdy in. He' d been expecting the good Reverend to visit for several days now, and he was confident in his original pre-dead zone sixth sense when it told him that it could only be Purdy at his door.

Sarah Bannerman waited patiently on Johnny Smith's red-tiled porch, waiting to be admitted to the inner sanctum, like an employee at a bank. She had come to see Madeleine Wey again - the second time that week, and had brought JJ to play with Julia. 

Irritated as she was by the barriers, both real and metaphysical, that Johnny had erected around himself, Sarah had to admit that she was glad to have an excuse to visit the familiar comfort of the Smith home. She reckoned she must have spent at least as much time in this house as she had her own whilst she and Johnny were growing up. Since moving back in, Johnny had not redecorated or moved the furniture around, or put up any of his own ornaments or pictures. It was exactly as his mother had left it. Sarah thought perhaps he had decided to keep it untouched so that there would always be one part of his life that was not contaminated and spoilt beyond all recognition by his car accident.

A little red LED flickered on the door panel.

"Sarah - I wasn't expecting you! Hey, JJ - what's happening?" Johnny's voice, robbed of all its bass tones by the tinny little speaker in the security mechanism, sounded like a trapped insect buzzing in a cardboard box.

"No...well, I haven't actually come to see you, Johnny. Strange though that may seem. I've come to see Madeleine, actually. Is she around?"

"Maddy? Yeah, she's in the family room I think. Come on in." There was a loud buzzing and an electronic ker-thunk as the solenoids holding the door closed stepped aside to let Sarah and JJ in.

JJ did not share his mother's pleasure at accompanying her to the Smith household. Although he was always pleased to see Johnny - who always had something cool or interesting to show him, that new girl Julia Wey was starting to freak him out.

JJ tended to stay well away from the girls when he was at school. They were too confusing. He had no real idea of what girls were for, or why they were so different, or what exactly it was that they wanted. This uncertainty made him feel awkward and ill at ease, even though Julia was always perfectly happy to play "boy" games with him - clashing Beyblades on the polished wood floor of the hallway, or zipping up and down the garden pathways on micro scooters.

What was really confusing JJ Bannerman was the fact that this girl actually seemed to like being around him. This was a brand new, mint condition, still in its original wrapping sensation. He guessed that it was only because there were no other girls around at the same time to huddle with, to run shrieking and giggling with mock alarm with every time he came round a corner or something. That was the one thing that really bugged JJ about girls - the shrieking and the giggling bit. Reluctantly, he followed his mother into Johnny's house.

#

Gene Purdy knotted his tie automatically into a perfect Windsor knot, undid it, and started all over again. 

He was staring at himself in the dresser-top mirror, trying to prepare himself for a meeting with Johnny Smith. He was acutely aware of the inherent problems in trying to out-psych a psychic. But his mind kept returning to the events of the previous day.

Following his little chat with Dana Bright, Purdy had take a long, slow walk around the grounds of the Faith Heritage Foundation University. The sudden fall of leaves in the recent high winds had evidently proved to be too much for the gardening staff, as the fickle wind was picking up great handfuls of leaves and tossing them all over the lawns and the pathways, with no regard for the status and dignity of the ornamental gardens. Purdy had watched as fallen leaves scudded across the path in front of him, like schools of tan and yellow fish; turning on a whim, rushing towards him before doubling back without warning. The dampness on the leaves caught the sunlight like iridescent scales.

A sudden hard knot of emotion had arrived without an invitation at the back of his throat at the idea that sometime soon, Purdy could lose his grip all of this. If John Smith regained control of his mother's money, Purdy would have to begin again from scratch. And it might not be so simple to do a second time around. Purdy had many natural talents and attributes - an irresistible speaking voice, a gentlemanly charm and refinement that frequently had women reduced to giggling school-girl status in his presence, reassured as they were by his chaste "man of the cloth" status. But could he ever find another Vera Smith to finance his enterprises, the work that God had called him to, not to mention post bail on his poor banged-up heart?

Purdy had nodded automatically in greeting to two students, bundled up in Fairisle against the bitter wind, and sat down rather heavily on an ornate iron bench by the side of the path. He watched for a long time as the last of the day's pale wintry sunlight leaked out of a crack in the sky, until the cold had became intolerable and started to freeze up his muscles. 

Cold fear was doing the same thing to his guts.

Purdy blinked at his reflection in his dresser mirror, as though surprised to see himself. He had been daydreaming again - a lapse in concentration that he could ill-afford. He crossed to his bed, sat down and picked up his telephone. He knew Johnny's number by heart.

"Ah, Johnny there you are. Has your cell phone been turned off?" asked Purdy mildly, knowing full well that Johnny almost certainly had caller ID on his phone and had been rejecting his calls for most of the morning. Johnny, seeming to read Purdy's mind, didn't answer the question.

"What can I do for you, Gene. Have my lawyers been in touch yet?"

"Yes, yes thank you Johnny, they have. No doubt you guessed that is the reason I am calling you. I would like to see you John and talk about this - no lawyers, no bits of paper, no courtroom dramas or newspaper scandals. You and I have known each other a very long time indeed Johnny. I am quite certain there must be some better way of settling this between us."

Johnny smiled and said nothing for a moment, enjoying the sensation of having The Very Reverend Gene Purdy dangling like a marionette on the other end of the telephone connection. He felt like he had him running scared. He made arrangements to meet the Reverend later that day, put down the phone, and thought nothing more about it.

#

"Why are you always brushin' your hair so much?" JJ asked Julia, taking a bite out of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich Johnny had deftly prepared for him. Johnny Smith was the acknowledged peanut butter and jelly sandwich KING in JJ's eyes.

"I have to look after it!" Julia replied, as though it was possibly one of the dumbest questions she had ever heard in her entire life. JJ coloured up. There was a pause between them, when the only sound was the electric crackle of static from the Barbie-pink hairbrush.

"Why?" asked JJ doggedly. As usual, his curiosity outweighed his discomfort.

Julia sighed. She had to take it slowly with this boy - he was younger than her after all, by at least 7 months. "My mom says I have really wild hair like my dad did ... does. It needs a whole lot of effort to keep it under control. It's like - I've got Dad's hair and Mom's teeth, which is not very lucky AT ALL, because I'll have to wear braces soon thanks to HER - humph!" She brushed her hair even more fiercely. "It's called...generics. Or something. You'll learn about it when you grow up."

JJ stared absently at her, lost in thought about hair and eyes and teeth and braces. So, if Julia had her dad's hair, did that mean she had to shave as well? Somehow he didn't think so.

"Who do you look most like JJ - your mom or your dad?"

"I dunno."

Her interest suddenly piqued, Julia put down the hairbrush. She slid off the bed and crossed to the dresser, reached down her vanity mirror and joined JJ, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

"Look in the mirror. Are you like your mom, or your dad?"

JJ looked. He pulled a few faces at himself experimentally, making himself and Julia laugh in the process. But the answer wasn't so easy. His hair wasn't like Walt's or Sarah's either really. His eyes were blue, but not as dark as Sarah's, and his teeth..? Where the milk teeth had come out and the 'big' teeth were on the way in, they were pretty crooked. 

"I think you and me will both be wearing braces," he said ruefully. He ran his tongue over the tips of his teeth. "I don't know who I look like. Mom, I guess." JJ's brow furrowed up in concentration. He decided to ask his mother who he looked most like, the next time he saw her.

Little did he know it, but JJ's insatiable curiosity was yet another trait he shared with his father.

#

Christopher Wey was also getting cold. It wasn't just a physical feeling, either. Inside himself something was glassing over and solidifying into a hard little nucleus of black ice. The same colour blood goes when it freezes. He could only vaguely identify the source of it; something to do with his lack of progress in determining how his world had come to be the way it was. It was almost too much effort to try and think about it. He had less and less hope of discovering anything that would let him complete his side of the bargain with Johnny Smith. 

Wey was really floundering. He had had no further visions from the dead bodies lying everywhere, unrotted and unburied - not that he could bear to touch them anyway. Sometimes he would hesitantly finger their clothes or personal possessions lying pathetically by people's sides - a cell phone, a shopping bag, a fraternity ring. The few living people he encountered, not surprisingly, did not want him to touch them. They had no answers for his shouted questions, his voice cracking and hoarse through disuse - "What happened here? What's caused all this?" They were only fleeting shadows he passed, like lightweight trash blown up the street on a windy day. 

All the visions he had experienced in the last week had been of normal, everyday life, the unknowing ignorant procession of people's lives, a soap opera episode from the few seconds immediately before the Event. 

His one solace was his unbelievable contact with Julia and Maddy. He kept the battered cane head in his hands more or less all the time now, waiting patiently for Johnny to pick up his cane and go and do something. But even these visions, treasured above all else, were becoming scarcer for some reason. Was Johnny sick - lying immobile in bed or something? Wey fretted helplessly as the cold winds of loneliness and despair gradually stripped him of basic human warmth.

Talk of the Devil, and he's sure to appear. Wey felt the now-familiar sensation of his feet parting company with his ground and finding another simultaneously - like a clever special effect in a movie. The lighting moved crazily around his cowlled head; the sounds and smells of his world changed - and there he was, in John Smith's rose garden again. The sickly aroma of the late summer blooms threatened to make him gag.

John Smith stood watching him mildly, feet braced slightly apart, both hands resting lightly on top of his cane, like Fred Astaire in a dance routine. All he needed was a top hat, a bow tie and a coat tail. Any moment now he would kick the bottom of his cane out to start the dancing again and this terrible tension would be over.

Wey stifled an uneasy giggle. Something was not right with this picture, and nerves always made him giggle at inappropriate moments. There was a new smell in his nostrils that was not dying roses. It could have been dread. Johnny Smith's unrelenting gaze, the slight curl of the smile on his lips, the confident and aggressive stance of the man, filled Wey with an inexplicable foreboding. Something horrid was creeping around the fringes of Wey's consciousness. 

How had Johnny got into the garden without Wey connecting to him as soon as he picked up his cane to walk out there?

Wey suddenly knew that he was being set up. This meeting was being stage-managed by Johnny. He was being controlled. The fear had started to inject a sluggish trickle of adrenalin into Wey's tattered body, and now he could feel the ancient fight-or-flight impulse hesitate briefly before making its decision. Wey got angry.

"Hey! Where's Maddy? Where's Julia? Where's my family?" 

"Where are my answers?"

The hot wind in Wey's sails sank and died. He was becalmed in a sea of despair.

"Where are my answers, Chris? You're the only person who can tell me what is going to happen. I need to know. Look..."

Johnny's tone softened. He broke eye contact and relaxed his stance a little. Wey recognised the tried and trusted Bad Cop, Good Cop routine. "Chris...look. You're worried about Maddy and Julia - I know that. But if we don't work together to crack this, what happens to them isn't going to matter more than a tinker's damn."

"You think I don't know that, Smith? I'm here living it now, aren't I? I've looked everywhere to find your precious answers. There's no electricity. No computers. No libraries, no videotapes, no internet, no microfiche, no archives; no goddamned mystic magical magician with a beard down to his knees to wave a wand and tell me the whole story right from when the dinosaurs died out. There is nothing here, John. Why should I care any more? I know that Maddy and Julia are okay here with you for...for however much longer there is. That's all I need to care about."

After a long moment, Johnny turned around and fetched Grissom's cane from where it had been resting against a garden bench. Wey hadn't noticed it. Johnny held it out, twirling it lightly through his long fingers.

"Do you still want to see them, Christopher?" asked Johnny very, very quietly. His words were almost carried away by the light breeze that was fingering the rose bushes. Abruptly a decaying bloom detached itself from the rest of the plant and fell to the earth in an untidy bundle of pink and brown petals.

Wey stared at Johnny soundlessly, his lips working but nothing coming out. He had no words left for his hatred of Johnny Smith, no words at all.

#

Author's Note: I know I've got Johnny behaving in a very un-Johnny manner, but trust me. He's reacting to the stress. It is all leading up to something. Let me know what you think. I'd love to get this finished before the next series airs...


End file.
